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Thursday, February 19, 2015

Like everyone else, I have fond, nostalgic memories of playing Morrowind back in the early 2000s, but I was never able to get into it properly. I put about 10-20 hours into it, then gave up and lost interest. And yet, every time I've seen screenshots or heard its music over the past decade, I've felt a desire to reinstall the game and relive the glory days that everyone always harkens back to when discussing Oblivion or Skyrim. And then, whenever I do, I'm soon reminded of why I was never able to appreciate Morrowind, even back in its prime.

It's a shame, really, because I think Morrowind truly is the best of the modern Elder Scrolls games. It has the most interesting world to explore with its completely unique fauna, wildlife, and architecture, and it has the deepest, most complex stats-based RPG mechanics of any modern Elder Scrolls game. There's a reason, after all, that Morrowind was such a popular hit in 2002. For many young gamers, it was their first experience diving into such a deeply rich, complex open-world; for me, I'd already been spoiled by Gothic and Gothic 2, which made it painfully obvious how soulless and mediocre Morrowind really was.

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Arx Fatalis is a first-person dungeon-crawling action-RPG from 2002 by Arkane Studios, the team who would later go on to develop Dark Messiah of Might and Magic in 2006 and Dishonored in 2012. Inspired by the Ultima Underworld games from the early 90s, Arx Fatalis is a modern adaptation of old school design. The world of Arx Fatalis is set entirely underground, after a dying sun forces humans, goblins, and trolls to retreat to the old dwarven mines and rebuild their cities underground. You play a nameless human who wakes up in a goblin prison cell with no memory of his past or his own identity. While attempting to recover your lost memories, you learn that you were sent to Arx to prevent an evil god from awakening, which becomes your main quest for the remainder of the game.

Like Arkane's other games, the draw in Arx Fatalis is that it offers players a lot of freedom to decide how to play the game, in terms of building your character in an open class system, how you choose to approach situations and solve puzzles, and how you go about exploring the world. This isn't a thorough, in-depth RPG with dialogue options and multiple solutions to quests, or an open-world sandbox game that lets you go wherever you want and do whatever you want, but it takes elements from those types of games and implements them in a more streamlined fashion. Normally, I would consider streamlining a very bad thing in an RPG, but the execution in Arx Fatalis offers plenty of satisfying depth while keeping the game's pace moving forward in a meaningful direction.

Sunday, February 1, 2015

By now I'm sure you're all aware of the colossal "ho hum" that is RAGE, id Software's first (and only) game since Doom 3, which came out way back in 2004. Seven years later, in 2011, they released Rage (as I'm stylizing it from here on out), boasting that it would feature a large world to explore, complete with vehicles, NPCs, towns, side missions, merchants, upgrades, and a crafting system -- a lot of "firsts" for the pioneers of the first-person shooter. The problem, you see, is that other games were already starting to do this at the time (and even a few years prior), and those other games not named Rage did the exact same thing, but better.

Rage is set in a post-apocalyptic future, after a meteor wipes out nearly all life on Earth and leaves much of the planet's surface a barren wasteland. Survivors have banded together in makeshift settlements to defend against bandits and mutants, while the Authority -- a group of technologically advanced soldiers -- attempts to govern the wasteland and restore unity with oppressive force. You play the role of an Ark survivor, a group of subjects put into cryogenic stasis deep underground, in order to repopulate Earth and rebuild civilization. When you emerge as the sole survivor of your Ark, over a hundred years after the meteor strike, you enter the wasteland on a mission to do .... something.